Cleaning up after Tora Bora is how John Kiriakou describes his own role in the region after the bombing of the Tora Bora mountains. Answering a viewer who asked whether either host had been at the battle, his reply was a flat correction of the premise: “I was not at the Battle of Tora Bora… No, I arrived two months after Tora Bora — but that’s why I went. I went to clean up the remnants of Tora Bora, and we had some real success.”[1][2] The correction matters to his account of his own career, since he has repeatedly resisted claims made on his behalf about which operations he was present for.
He dates the bombing itself to the end of October 2001 and his own arrival in Pakistan, as chief of CIA counterterrorism operations, to January 2002 — “we had just finished bombing Tora Bora.”[3][4]
Why there was anything to clean up
In Kiriakou’s telling the clean-up exists because the encirclement failed. In October 2001 “we believed… that we had Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership cornered at Tora Bora,” and the bombing was extensive.[5][6] What the Americans did not know was that “the translator for the commander of Central Command was actually an al-Qaeda operative.”[6][5] The result: “bin Laden dressed as a woman and he escaped under the cover of darkness in the back of a pickup truck into Pakistan. And so when the sun came up at dawn there was no one in Tora Bora to give up. They had all escaped. And so we had to move the fight to Pakistan proper.”[7]
The high-value targets identified during the bombing, he says, “just went over the passes into Pakistan and just dissolved into the ether.”[8] The one senior figure the campaign did kill was Mohammed Atef, al-Qaeda’s head of military affairs, in the October bombing — the only major leader dead and none captured, which is the position from which the hunt for Abu Zubaydah began.[9][10][11]
Kiriakou’s own contribution followed from the geography. Rather than climb “these forbidding mountains to capture them one at a time,” he proposed working the Pakistani side of the border, where the survivors had gone.[3]
What the clean-up consisted of
Asked what that meant in practice, Kiriakou accepted the host’s characterisation — “scavenging for evidence and information and stuff that’s left behind” — and the exchange added the second half: detaining “people that were a little too slow to get away from us.”[12][2]
The volume was substantial. “We had captured dozens of al-Qaeda fighters as they were coming across the border from Afghanistan after the bombing of Tora Bora” — and it was while loading them onto an aircraft that Kiriakou first heard of the destination. He asked an Air Force man where they were being taken, and was told Guantánamo; “the base in Cuba?” — “yeah, he said, they came up with this really great idea.”[13]
The interrogations of those men were Kiriakou’s first. The earliest was a Jordanian “we captured coming across the border from Tora Bora,” cuffed and chained to an eyebolt in the table — and Kiriakou had never conducted an interrogation before, because “we didn’t have interrogation classes at the CIA.”[14] The man’s account of himself was that he had run an orphanage funded by generous benefactors who asked nothing of him, that he had never carried a weapon, and that as an Arab living in a non-Arab country he had been approached for help.[15]
What Kiriakou actually wanted from him was cartography. He laid a map on the table and asked the prisoner to trace “the path that you took from Tora Bora across the mountains into Pakistan” — the smuggling corridors the agency called rat lines, which they wanted to plug. Because the mountains are too steep and jagged to cross directly, the routes run through a fixed set of valleys, which made the mapping specific and useful: “show me how you got from Tora Bora to Quetta, Pakistan. And he laid it all out” — a village here, a man with a Toyota pickup truck who drove him from one point to the next.[15][16]
Others came out of the bombing itself. One detainee Kiriakou describes had been hiding in a cave at Tora Bora when a cruise missile was fired into it, and was one of only two people to come out alive.[17]
The assessment Kiriakou gives in his own words is brief and positive — “we had some real success” — and he does not itemise it further.[12]
What it left him with
The only physical trace he mentions is a souvenir: a giant chunk of raw lapis lazuli taken from a house belonging to Osama bin Laden, which he says he still has and offered to bring to a later broadcast.[12][18]
The period described here — early 2002, in Afghanistan and then Pakistan — is the one from which most of Kiriakou’s operational accounts of the war on terror are drawn. He also dates the beginning of the relationship he valued most to it: “after the fall of Tora Bora” he volunteered to go overseas at a time when the official American relationship with the Pakistanis was “very close, very warm, very cooperative,” and says he came to like and respect his Pakistani counterparts.[19]